


Ad Paradisum

by aalgorithm



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Captain America: The First Avenger, M/M, World War II
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-02-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:54:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22425154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aalgorithm/pseuds/aalgorithm
Summary: Love, which pardons no beloved from loving,took me so strongly with delight in himThat, as you see, it still abandons me not.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	1. In the Sunflowers Stood Virgil

**Author's Note:**

> Wish me luck on this one, folks. I don't have the strength nor patience to complete the work before posting nor the capability to keep a schedule. Maybe when I finish the story I'll reduce it to one consistent work without chapters...?

“Love, which quickly arrests the gentle heart,

Seized him with my beautiful form

That was taken from me, in a manner which still grieves me.

Love, which pardons no beloved from loving,

took me so strongly with delight in him

That, as you see, it still abandons me not...”

-Dante Alighieri, _Dante’s Inferno –_ Canto 5

**AD PARADISUM**

Bucky had lost his guide. It got stuck up there in the atmosphere, lost in the sky he couldn’t see amidst the black smoke. He couldn’t feel the warmth, couldn’t smell the flowers, couldn’t hear the hearty laugh. Fuck, he couldn’t see through his own _eyes_ , let alone launch a search.

So he wretched and wretched. Bucky heaved until his throat was so dry that the walls of his mouth and tongue tasted like sandpaper and bile. His hands dug into the dirt, were cut open by the shrapnel, and he squeezed and squeezed and watched the red pool down his palms. He stared as he waited for that entity named Death, that which had been lingering above his shoulder.

Death had been efficient; he’d reduced Bucky’s brothers to red and brown, black and purple slashes on dusty, war-torn terrain. He could see the whites of their eyes pulled open, pulled taut against miens of instantaneous agony now immortalized. Bucky wished they’d look away, wished they’d just die and crumble to dirt.

He was lost without his guide, his sticking point, the golden idol he’d followed in footsteps of all shapes, sizes, and paces for years on end. The dedication and epithet to Bucky’s every anecdote was concealed in smoke and expiry. The end of that infamous line was drawn before him and he had no choice but to cross it alone.

Bucky Barnes descended into a new Hell that day, something far different than he’d been promised in Sunday school should he forgo his time in the confessional. This Hell was neither hot nor putrid, full of suffering written into existence in accordance with his earthly sins. This pain, this punishment, simply hurt because it was designed to destroy. It tore limbs apart, severed families, shattered hearts, torpedoed the mind.

He made it back behind the United States’ lines on a whim, on wandering feet, searching for purchase that was a hundred, a thousand, a million miles away. They would ask him what happened, and he’d detail the ambush in between bouts of vomit. They’d panic at his dehydration and he’d collapse into mud, tongue aching for the moisture and dew locked away in the soil.

But he’d still wake in the morning, craving more than anything to remain in that drowsy dark.

Overseas, Bucky’s guide would stir when the sunlight gleaned his cheeks. He’d check the time, lace up his boots, bid farewell to the old photos and sketches kept at his bedside, and hope that the wanderer he’d claimed at such a tender young age was doing well. The guide’s tireless paranoia would tell him otherwise, but he’d still beat it down. He’d promised to avoid committing anything “stupid,” and what kind of example would the guide be setting if he succumbed to such a failure of the mind?

After all, the guide’s sin of choice was self-sacrifice, and he was on his way at six in the morning to go partake in it, to bathe in its tepid, luxurious blades, to let the risk of it all give him worth in the midst of so much meaningless demise.

\--

Steve Rogers was born with strawberry blond hair. Bucky knew as much from the lone colored baby photo his mother kept at her bedside, the photo he used to secretly prod at in wonder because, somehow, Steve looked even smaller then than he did now. But Bucky didn’t require the pictorial evidence; his imagination and dedication to Steve Rogers physical makeup was valiant and constant. It had been for years.

The first memory Bucky really had of this hair color, however, was a warm 1928 July spent in a lush sunflower field in upstate New York. The last trip Bucky could recall taking, Steve had found enough of a reprieve from his chronic rheumatic fever (which they’d lovingly dubbed the “pink-ring sweats” after the rash that dotted Steve’s arms) for them to visit an uncle’s wheat farm. They spent the mornings in the fields, the evenings cupping lightning bugs in their palms, the nights underneath an attic roof whose shingles were aged enough for blips of starlight to leak through.

That Monday night of the trip, when Sarah Rogers was growing concerned that Steve’s asthma was acting up in the humidity, he ran away into the fields, embarrassed about his perception of himself: an inconvenience. Bucky was tasked with finding him, ensuring the Rogers’ family that’d he’d be alright. But the sunflower crop was massive, tall, and suffocating. Eleven minutes into the search Bucky was losing track of his steps. He took a firm tumble on a dismembered stalk, scraped his knee in the dirt, and felt a twinge of anguish spark tight in his throat.

It must have been the commotion of his spill amid the flowers that alerted the object of his search. While he picked out stray sunflower seeds from the new wound, he heard distinct sniffling. The barely ten-year-old frame of Steve emerged from the stalks, which now acquired the likeness of thick, strait shadows pointing like needles in reverence to the sky. He rubbed his nose pitifully on his sleeve.

Despite the spotty starlight, despite the damp wind and the absence of daytime warmth, Bucky could still see the golden streaks on Steve’s head. They glowed like the lightning bugs they’d been barred from capturing that day, like the honey Sarah Rogers kept in jars for special occasions, like the daffodils and daisies dames wore to Sunday Church in their hair.

Steve was wheezing in between his hiccoughs and sobs, and Bucky could see those distinctive pink rings around the crooked collar of his shirt. He was sick, but Bucky’s ankle was twisted and scarlet was dribbling down his leg, so Steve took up the job. He interlocked their fingers and traced the foot-trampled stems back to Bucky’s makeshift entrance far easier than Bucky had managed, head bobbing up and down all uneven-like.

Feeling a summer lethargy overtaking him, combined with a relief at knowing he’d done Sarah Rogers proud and that his brief and nightmarish visions of Steve’s stationary figure entwined with stalks and petals and seeds could be cast aside, Bucky stared blankly at that sunny scalp. He watched it slip and slide and turn and shake. Consistently bright, a beacon, he’d never realized so fully the iridescence Steve had been gifted.

He deserved it. When so much of his life was bleak by default, dreary via some sense of cosmic irony, he deserved the effulgent shade. And at least that way Bucky would never lose sight of him. Steve guided him out of the field within seven minutes and collapsed into his mother’s arms, panting through broken lungs. They cut their trip short by half a day wrapped in the delusion that the Brooklyn air back home would treat him any better.


	2. Chapter 2

Bucky never checked if the winter of 1935 was, on record, especially dreary. But he believed in his own right that it was and wore the splintered, snow-cold skin to prove it.

He wasn’t old enough nor entitled enough to argue with Sarah Rogers like that. He knew it, knew it tens time over, knew it because it drew lines of age and exhaustion on her face and embarrassed her son to no end. But, dammit, she wasn’t seeing reason. And it made perfect, crystal-clear sense, within that chilly November, why Steve had a heart of absolute gold; he’d inherited it from her at birth, no later.

She wouldn’t leave the TB wards even when she started looking as bony as the patients she handled gently in their baby blue hospital gowns. She would go outside to cough and sputter so Steve wouldn’t hear. She would rub warm water on her face to bring the color back to her cheeks. She would never complain. Bucky never heard her carp once, not since her husband bit his own bullet at least half a lifetime ago.

And maybe he could’ve handled a dose of selflessness that large, perhaps he could stomach the nobility of Sarah Rogers, if her son wasn’t committed to dying on that exact same hill.

Steve broke his elbow in October following New York’s first premature snowfall of the season. The precipitate froze over and left a trail of nasty black ice in its wake just outside the Rogers’ one-bedroom. Bucky hadn’t been there to witness the spill (no one had; Steve limped his way back inside and attempted to wrap the injury himself), but he could imagine it with ease. In public, he laughed and joked at his companion’s clumsiness. In private, he changed the dressings and charged himself with resetting the bone, having learned how to do so from the rough-n-tumble armed forces’ handbooks he’d scrounged.

He spent more and more time trying to convince Steve to take it easy, to stop making trips to the supermarket unaccompanied until he had a better handle on his impeded limb, than he spent back home. And when he slid quietly into the Barnes’ household, he pretended not to hear his mother stir upstairs at the noise of his arrival. He’d yet to beat her maternal instincts with his stealth but planned to. Soon.

Bucky did manage to carve time out for his parentally instituted faith on Sundays. Most Sundays. Every once-in-a-while Sundays. Some Sundays the spectacle was too pitiful, especially when his Sunday-best stopped fitting well, when his sisters’ stockings had holes in the knees and ankles, when the elbows in his mother’s coat had worn so thin that her skin visibly protruded. They were all cold. 1935 was a dreary goddamn winter, and Bucky was helpless to fix it.

Churches were warm, of course, or at least physically. Bucky savored in the heat of his mother’s palms as they were instructed to grasp one another’s hands. It was a rare occurrence, hearing her cadence unobstructed by neither snow, exhaustion, nor woeful apathy.

The Rogers hadn’t been around at service in a while. Sarah was contagious, and Steve wasn’t well yet, meaning they didn’t even have the luxury of the tepid cathedral balm. Sarah would just carry on in silent, tuberculosis-induced agony and Steve would keep buying groceries and carrying them back to their one-bedroom perilously while Bucky stood privileged before the altar, waiting to receive.

In December of 1935, Bucky still had reason to admire his mom’s singing, reason to let it fill his lungs and the space in between his ribs with the soothing, languid peace only such matriarchs could yield. The winter was brutal. He raked through his guts and upturned his brain for a way to keep both his families, biological and extended, healthy, safe, and dry.

But when Sarah Rogers collapsed on her way to work, body wrought with disease, that hope’s flame was extinguished like a sizzling candle in a snowbank. Steve’s cast had been removed a month prior, in February, but looked more wrecked than his elbow ever could’ve.

The Barnes family sat just behind the front row of attendees at Sarah Rogers’ funeral, and a miserable front row it was, for Steve had no more family with whom to surround himself. What plane of sadness he traversed stayed unknown to Bucky, for, while he could barely contain his own abject mess of tears, Steve stood stoic and pale, watching blankly the scene unfold before him without the slightest speck of fear to dot his face. His head of flaxen hair gleamed in the dusty sunlight pouring in from the stained-glass windows, casting green and red and purple and other things; it made Bucky’s tears hot and irresistible. Grief became a lion, an insurmountable mountain, a chasm.

Why couldn’t Bucky make a move to speak to Steve? He watched his best friend’s shoulders quiver through the homily, watched him sit there alone and cold (clearly freezing, hardly enough fabric round his body to reach both his knobby shoulders) as Sarah Rogers was taken from the cathedral. Bucky felt his voice clamber and collapse on the incline of his esophagus as the congregation made the short journey to the cemetery, during which Steve’s determination to stay illusory begged to be assuaged. Bucky was stuck as a puddle, a heaping, sopping, ugly mess.

He did manage to slide away from the rest of the Barnes clan in the moments following Sarah Rogers’ descent into the ground; Bucky swore up and down he heard her wooden death box clunk on the cold, New York soil and gritted his teeth at the noise.

And Steve, dammit, was so short and careened into himself that he was near impossible to locate amidst the slowly dissipating crowd of mourners. Bucky bumped strangers’ shoulders without grace, without acknowledgment, biting his tongue to prevent any chastisements, offensive or tame, from swimming forth, and took a sharp inhale upon spotting the last standing Rogers atop a hill a hundred feet or so away, near the cemetery gates.

Of course Steve was trying to leave. Bucky had the same thought: should they make it back home, maybe things would resort to normalcy, to yesterday, to last winter, to that sunflower summer. Bucky, though tempted, always tempted and persuaded easily around Steve, followed him wordlessly, kept his distance, even, as his syllables slowly climbed the frontier of his voice box.

He was side by side with Steve as they rounded the corner where Bruce’s convenience store sat, windows dim and foggy. That’s where Sarah purchased her honey, where she and Bucky would scrounge expired newspapers and pencils for Steve to occupy his sick days with, the store wherein Steve bought the precarious groceries. Bruce and his daughter had been at the service, had yet to return. It seemed important that Steve was the first to depart but Bucky quickly let the thought drift away.

“How was it?” he asked, sounding away from himself.

“It was okay,” Steve replied, without hesitation, as though a transcript of the upcoming exchange were laid out in front of him. “She’s next to Dad.”

Joseph Rogers, ‘Dad,’ a stranger to them both, was an empty comment to make.

“I was gonna ask…”

Too predictable. Bucky cursed himself, wiping away the smile of feigned conversational ease and bravado, his limp attempt at softening the mood, the day, the circumstances. Steve brushed three fingers through the blond foliage dripping down his forehead, signaling a crack in the armor through which his inevitably gallant and unselfish soliloquy poured.

“I know what you’re gonna say, Buck. I just…”

How do you soften something that’s _cold_?

“We can put the couch cushions on the floor like when we were kids.”

You could warm it up with nostalgia.

Steve ransacked his jacket for his keys. Bucky knew the damn thing only had two pockets; he’d sewn them back together himself, though perhaps his handiwork was more dubious than he realized.

“It’ll be fun,” he vented, drawing up a picture in his mind so very separate from that which reality offered. “All you gotta do is shine my shoes, maybe take out the trash.”

You could light the fire of familiarity, of dependency, of a crutch that wouldn’t go away once its use had expired and the bone was healed. Bucky turned his attention to the floor of the Rogers’ porch, kicked a loose brick out of place and retrieved Steve’s boon.

“Come on,” he pleaded, masking it with another grin. He felt his cheeks twitch and grind with the labor. He reached outward with the key, nestling the metal thing between the pads of his thumb and index finger. He offered it like communion, like a covenant between them, burned inside for Steve’s agreement.

The latter looked on with greying blue eyes, unable to take help and unable to perceive when he needed it most, when Bucky wanted to give it the most.

Steve relinquished the key.

“Thank you, Buck. But I can get by on my own.”

Bucky, tempted to snap his once-broken arm just to reset it again and prove a point, struggled against the urge to scratch his scalp. His skin crawled with annoyance, mixed with love, mixed with devotion, mixed with icy March air, mixed with whatever that stony look of altruism Steve wore like a pendant over both brows. It drew blood where the needle pierced his forehead, sometimes.

Sarah never taught Steve to sew, or if she had, he’d been a lousy student. Wasn’t that reason for him enough? How could he willingly surrender to holey pockets, is what Bucky justified to himself as reasoning enough.

“The thing is, you don’t _have_ to.”

A hand with dry, cracked knuckles found Steve’s shoulder. Bucky doubted he could summon the warmth from his heart to his palms to Steve’s gangly physique like his mother could for him, but he did his best.

“I’m with you to the end of the line, pal.”

Tension broke like a dam against rapids; Steve’s arms sagged with an unfamiliar alleviation, took Bucky’s already ambiguous sense of balance along with it, and two clouds parted a thousand miles away to let the sun through. Steve was all gold, his small smile a hundred stars exuding more hope and assurance that the world wasn’t Hell, that this winter wasn’t dreary as shit, that paradise could be found in ordinariness, than Bucky could very well stand.

_Consistently bright, a beacon_

\--

Enlistment offices, thank the Lord, weren’t open on Sundays, so Bucky didn’t have to completely tarnish his Sabbath by running in the rain, snow, sleet, or what have you three miles to drag Steve (or whomever he was posed as on that particular outing) out of their doors. And the docks only took evening shipments on Sundays, the closest thing to _holy_ Bucky’s employers ever reached. Ergo, his day didn’t start before the bell tolled 5 AM. The Lord giveth, on occasion.

On occasion, Bucky awoke to a silent apartment. Mornings void of creaking floorboards, rumbling pipes, angry commuters outside waving obscenely at their neighbors, foghorns, barking dogs, hissing cats, shrieking children, screeching tires. His eyes peeled open slower on such mornings, adjusted with ease until sunspots transformed into glistening, fading orbs of a limbo between dream and reality.

Turning over on his side on a Sunday morning in June, countless moons away from the grief that had once befallen Steven Grant Rogers, rendering him motherless, Bucky experienced one such morning. He yawned, grinned, stretched two practiced and sturdy arms above his head, stared at the wooden, knotty floor until his vision came to. He appreciated the silence about him.

Sunday mornings, given their esteemed nature, also came with a sort of ritual. Thus, Bucky started from his mattress stationed in the apartment’s leftmost corner and made for the refrigerator, hoping it stayed cold, hoping the milk had escaped expiration. He removed the glass bottle, sniffed the white froth with great relief, and shut the door with the bare, dusty heel of his foot. His socks lay shed and forgotten at the edge of his bed.

June hadn’t grown too hot yet; it’d gotten off to a late start, he informed Steve. It was customary that with the turn of every season came new ailments for Steve to endure. June, July, August, and September brought with them swimmer’s ear, heat rash, flares of eczema suffered by both parties, and medically inexplicable bouts of strep throat. The refrigerator, a timeless, transient appliance, liked to quit when Brooklyn became too fiery. Some days, Bucky couldn’t blame it, often slick with perspiration himself.

Bucky and Steve drank milk and ate gold nugget cake on Sundays, when their budget allowed for it. The past few weeks hadn’t been as generous, but today he drew the spongey marvel out of the fridge delicately, poured two quaint glasses, and sighed, staring expectantly at the back of the sofa.

He hadn’t been quiet in preparing his ritual, not at all. There was little to be muted about on blessed Sundays such as those.

“Stevie. Sundays are _my_ day to sleep in. Hell, did’ja even take out the goddamn–”

His eyes flicked to the trash bin, which was spic and span and empty. A car honked outside, fortunately not accompanied by a screech, nor a bout of angry discourse.

“Lucky you. Doin’ chores early. But seriously. What’d’r’ya so sleepy for?”

Bucky paused, dangling a lengthy knife above the cake, just about ready to dive in and mutilate the thing.

“Stevie…?”

He stabbed the cake in the middle for safe keeping, absolutely compromising its structural integrity. He sauntered deftly toward the sofa Steve had long since claimed, despite the scratchy fabric, aware of each groaning floorboard and every stray nail threatening harm. It required a dance of him, really.

And where Steve should’ve been sat a poorly folded cotton sheet. He’d been gone a while, it seemed, for the indentation his head left behind during sleep had filled out some.

Bucky’s jaw clenched, an involuntary movement of consternation and unease so predictable, its presence only served to fulfill this aforementioned ritual. He sighed, scratching the back of his head and his chest through his thinning white tee shirt.

“Come _on,_ Rogers. Don’t go fuckin’ up my Sunday…”

Bucky found himself more loquacious when alone and, fittingly, grumbled all alone as he slid on his trousers and shirt and socks, shedding away all the chances for a tranquil morning the more layers he piled on. He swiped the key from atop the refrigerator (another quirky home they’d gifted it in homage to the stray bricks of Steve’s childhood porch), returned the Sunday delicacies back into the fridge, and swept out the door. Humidity, abundant, squelched Bucky’s lungs upon impact.

They’d moved closer to the smelly docks two years or so after Sarah’s death. The rent was low, their standard of living lower. Bucky’s family dog had died since then. His sisters got boyfriends, his mother leukemia, himself a real man’s job, Steve a penchant for falsifying his identity. He spent so much time throwing woven nets over helms, chasing his roommate, and worrying about the way boys ogled girls as bright-eyed and good as his siblings that the grieving bullet wound following his mother’s funeral had practically been plugged in his sleep.

Bucky was happy to have Steve with him, always had been and probably always would be, even when he wasn’t. Living with someone so deeply and naturally alone was more challenging than expected; balancing the desire to protect and lash out was even harder. He had yet to sufficiently explain to Steve that togetherness wasn’t scary, wasn’t archaically doomed, and that leaving with _out_ explanation was abnormal and _truly_ scary, and, really, just an outright royal pain in Bucky Barnes’ ass.

Steve would just say it didn’t “have to be such a royal pain in your [Bucky’s] ass,” and Bucky would get stuck trying to explain why that wasn’t the case.

Rocks and various New York shrapnel ricocheted off the soles of Bucky’s shoes as he jogged around the corner of their street. He waited eagerly for one to pierce through the tapering leather as he waved to familiar work faces enjoying their New Yorkers’ peace and quiet with their loved ones, expertly dodging vehicles and other pedestrians all the while. He didn’t pause to wonder if he seemed peculiar to them.

He did pause, however, was in fact _made to_ , in front of Bruce’s convenience store about a third of a mile into his jog. By that time the pits of his shirt had grown damp; the sun was doing its darndest to peer from behind a dense stratum of cirrus clouds, not succeeding enough to promote squinting but providing more than enough heat, nonetheless.

Bruce was outside his storefront, lounging handsomely on a wooden rocking chair while his daughter swept in and around his feet. He called to Bucky, instantly and intuitively understanding why he was giving chase and to whom such a chase was devoted.

“Went out ‘round this corner, Barnes.” Bruce maintained eye contact even through the form of his daughter, whose name Bucky hoped was Polly because that’s all he could conjure from her braided, reddish hair and alert expression. She’d always been keenly aware of him, minutely perturbed when he stopped by yet glimmering when Steve did.

“Any idea why?” he responded, wiping his right forearm across his face. “Asshole up and left before I was even awake.”

“On his way to try ‘n sign up again, I would _assume_.”

Bucky’s posture softened, making the rest of the walk toward Bruce’s and stopping at the foot of the porch. It was painted green, or had been, at one point, and Bruce had forever rejected his offers to redo the job. Bucky relished in the shade it afforded while Polly ceased sweeping to give Bucky a detailed once-over. He saw his mother in her harmless, transitory distaste. He probably needed shaving.

“C’mon, Bruce. It’s _Sun_ day. They won’t open the doors for nobody, let alone Rogers.”

Bruce shrugged, leaning in a few inches closer as if to confide something.

“Haven’t ya heard? The office down on 3rd street’s open today. Said it’s for a ‘morale boost,’ or some other crazy fuckin’ crock of –”

“ _Dad_ ,” Polly chastised, holding her broom to his throat before he shifted his weight and shooed her away.

“Never mind. Point is Rogers wouldn’t tell me where he was goin’ – and you know I asked, of course – so I’d _assume_ that’s where those skinny legs of his were takin’ him.”

Bucky rose to his toes and then returned back down, feeling a rock in his shoe but too anxious to remove it. “Sounds about right,” he admitted, twirling, kicking up dust, before picking up speed again.

“What’s that sonuvabitch suppose’ to do when you’re shipped outta here?” Bruce shouted to him, Brooklyn drawing his mouth open as wide as a python at every consonant.

“Haven’t thought that far ahead yet, ‘m afraid.”

He took off in a dust storm towards 3rd street, knowing exactly what he’d find when he got there, almost confused as to why he bothered pursuing it. The enlistment personnel would do his job long before he got there. Some part of Bucky hoped he’d witness the day when their rejections finally got the best of Steve, yet he doubted if he could handle the look of misery that would befall his expression at that final blow.

Banners of red and white and blue strewn out like a procession guided the wandering, patriotic eye down the strait of 3rd street. Uncle Sam wagged his finger at Bucky, as though to condemn him and celebrate Steve, whereas, as far as he was concerned, Steve was the crazy one in this scenario; Bucky had played the foolish on enough stages in enough scenes elsewhere.

There was a line out the door. The enlistment office on 3rd street in Brooklyn, New York inevitably smelled like fish because everyone did and there was a line of souls out the door, bouncing excitedly on their feet. A boys’ club of countenances only slightly younger than himself with ample nobility and sacrifice and patriotism leaking out their ears, eyes, and conjoined hearts to win the war and then some. It was the pinnacle of Americanism, Bucky deduced, and he couldn’t wait to yank Steve away from its toxic influence.

Bucky had never been gifted that sense of sacrifice, at least not in that way, namely because it downright terrified him. Steve, meanwhile, made up for them both.

He scuttled through a throng of child-bystanders, those genuinely too young to sign up, yet one of whom that probably bested Steve in height.

“You sign up?” the tallest asked, shooting greedy eyes and freckly cheeks up at Bucky, who licked his own salty lips.

“They’ve got my number already, don’t you worry.”

The group of them stood a few paces from the office’s bay window, peering through the panes at the hustle and bustle of war machine bureaucracy and a body of pejorative medical personnel. Bucky counted plenty of skinny elbows and wrists and watched as incandescent bulbs cast sickly, yellowish glows on those inside, as though passage through were an arduous, diseased task.

Never a people watcher himself, even Bucky appreciated the lineup. Fishermen and bakers, storekeepers, iron workers, cab drivers, fresh schoolboys with their WWI fathers in tow, the poor, the less poor, the really destitute, the middle class the news insisted was thriving against even Bucky’s impoverished judgement. They scrambled to get inside and then seemed to immediately fall ill upon arrival.

It was the lighting, he knew this, but he also knew that look of cataclysmic, unavoidable understanding that crossed and squatted upon – without fail - the brow of every volunteer and draftee back at basic training. He knew it because he had yet to shake it off himself.

How one understands something one has yet to experience makes no sense. Bucky _also_ knew this. But that light made them sickly. That much was obvious.

“ _Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”_ Bucky surmised to himself, misquoting yet chuckling all the same.

His scanning proved fruitless around two minutes into the venture and he resolved to squeeze through the line, prepared to display to everyone who protested him the two pieces of jangling, rectangular metal he wore masochistically round his sunburnt neck. (Again, they’d already called his number, claimed his livelihood.) Fortunately for all involved parties, Steve emerged from his haven of falsehoods and lofty, gun-blazing dreams and back into the trivial Brooklyn morning of his own dejected accord.

He was all _but_ happy to see Bucky, who pretended like the blow didn’t hurt.

“Ol’ Bruce found you out,” Bucky announced, removing himself from the spectating children, feeling a stare or two linger on the back of his head.

Steve swallowed, swiped three digits through the peak of his hair, and turned to face the road from whence Bucky had come. Ashamed, sure, but not at being discovered. The ensuing conversation was one which they had frequently, a well-rehearsed dialogue.

“What was the name this time?”

“You helped me think of it, asshole,” Steve spat, shockingly venomous. Again, Bucky withheld the flinch. It reminded him of being knocked flat during basic training for being just that: an asshole.

Steve began trudging ahead, nursing a heavy head and a stiff upper lip. Bucky followed and tried to remain quiet, all funeral-dirge-like.

“You left me to eat my own big fat slice ‘a gold nugget alone, you know,” he teased as they passed under a bout of construction scaffolding, makeshift curtains made of ruined sheets swaying in the tiniest of summertime breezes. Steve pushed one out of his way, still a pace and a half ahead (Bucky made sure of it) and did not extend his reach to accommodate Bucky’s entrance. He walked square into the thing.

Steve turned his neck twenty degrees, leftward bound: “Milk still good?”

Bucky sniffed, pined briefly for some water, for this mood to pass. “Good enough.”

Like a child, like a poor, Great Depression child, the promise of that rare and silken commodity gave a jolt to Steve’s step. And like always, the tides of dismissal ebbed and flowed and eventually receded from Steve. He was without balance, however; when he wasn’t beating himself senseless over his latest rejection, he was marching back down to the rejectors with a new name, wrists that would snap if you twisted hard enough, and the same stupid, pink, proud, American face. It was a face they were supposed to love, the army, the navy, the bond salesmen, the President, but, on account of the rest of Steve’s physicality, they had to turn him away.

It was funny, being endlessly blessed with rejection due to Steve’s pitiful frame when Bucky had come to regard it so dearly. But that was a private thought, not one to share over milk and cake.

Bruce had retreated inside, probably to observe more of red-headed Polly’s housekeeping, once they reached home. Bucky fingered the key in his pants’ pocket, passing Steve once they neared the building’s communal front door and made the sharp right up the staircase.

“Why do you always follow me, huh?” he declared rather suddenly, voice bouncing in the dusty moisture of half-past-ten in the morning on a June Sunday. When Bucky turned to face him, his eyes were more blue than grey, and Bucky’s heart felt more red than dark.

“So I can wring your neck when I find you there, right in front of the enlistment officer, so they don’t want you,” he confessed. “So I can drag you back home and put you back together again. And give you gold nugget cake to say sorry.”

Bucky turned the key into their apartment, heard Steve groan, watched backwards through his own skull as those blue eyes rolled around in a head that was too big for its shoulders. He heard the refrigerator running, a dull hum. He heard Steve file in behind him, safe and comfortably dismal. Bucky heard himself breathe easy.

“You don’t have much longer, huh?” Steve asked as he flung off his shoes. “Till they call for you.”

It, truly, meant nothing to Bucky then. He removed the milk and cake from the fridge again and gaped at the way his stomach demanded it, even grinned at the noise emanating from his insides.

“Seems like it, Rogers.”

Bucky didn’t care to watch whatever expression passed Steve’s face in reply.

“When you’re gone, you can’t go chasin’ after me, you know. Then I’ll figure out a way to sign up.”

Bucky removed the knife and brushed the crumbs that stuck to the blade deftly on his pantleg, scoffing, as Steve reached for the milk beside him. From his periphery he saw two bony hands grasp both glasses and couldn’t fathom breaking them, even to prove a point to some Constitution-touting undertaker determined to grant Steve the one thing he wanted most.

“What, you think _I_ can’t figure out a way?” he retorted, handing a mound of cake to Steve who was abruptly ravenous and squeezed the thing mercilessly between his fingers.

“They’ll ship you out to Germany. To Italy.”

“Even if I end up in goddamn _Russia_ , Rogers, I’ll still be on your ass. Ain’t no sense in you haulin’ yourself overseas just to make my job easier.”

Crumbs stuck to Steve’s reedy cheeks; he wiped them away with the back of his hand.

“You love a challenge.”

Bucky held his glass of milk to the ceiling, smiling with every ounce of his countenance at the idea of Steve staying securely between those apartment walls while he inexorably went to blow some other folks’ brains out. Everyone said you had to look forward to something to get you through. This was his.

“I sure as hell _do_.”

In solidarity, Steve threw back his glass in record time like it was a challenge to be won.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there is something so incredibly intimate about Steve being an artist and Bucky being one of the few people to ever witness his work.

Before Bucky was a part of the Howling Commandos, before he was sent to Italy, before he watched his first team get blown to red and brown and black bits as the smallest of them stepped on a German landmine, before he spent his days in dugouts pretending to sleep, penning letters he’d never send, saying prayers he hardly meant those days, he’d gone dancing with a group of girls in London. Gotten drunk off their perfume, off their laughs, off their womanhood. Off their humanity. Not many people had that anymore, he’d realized.

And he remembered this memory well, fondly, even, because it reminded him of an even more distant one, wrapped tight in waning innocence and ignorance, yellow and white, like a Mary Jane candy. It started with a half-hearted goodbye to his absolute other half on a swell and ordinary and blustery Thursday evening, wherein he was able to remain so composed and unbothered because this other half had stayed unsuccessful in his efforts to get himself drafted.

Bucky did well to remind him of this and invited the other half to dance, even, in merriment. It wasn’t in celebration of his departure – no, he could tell Steve mourned this, but Bucky couldn’t acknowledge it, for he had yet to deal with their incoming, palpable distance - but of Steve’s stagnancy. Steve was going to live between their four walls, go to art school, write Bucky letters, plaster their walls with the next Monet’s and Van Gogh’s and Picasso’s, and Bucky would be away just long enough for Steve to forget enough of him. And when news broke that some Nazi had landed a bullet square down the middle of James Buchanan Barnes’ skull, Steven Grant Rogers would lament like a normal person, not empty-like, not in the way that left room for idiotic motivation to go and die in tandem.

That’s why Bucky twirled two girls at his sides and started making that distance between himself and Steve real. Things were easier when done voluntarily, selfishly. No matter how he ached and agonized like his intestines and vocal cords were being strummed for sport. No matter how despondent Steve looked as he left him alone in that gilded, glowing museum hall of American hedonism and military might. No matter how the dames brushed their rears testily against his hips. No matter the rock in his throat. Bucky knew this was easier. Bucky knew he’d won their little game, their glass-of-milk challenge.

There was a drizzle in the air as the brown and blonde dames roped their arms through his and trotted excitedly toward the downtown bar. It did little to extinguish the hubbub and zeal Howard Stark’s presence had engendered among the Brooklyn populous. Streamers and confetti and posters glittered in the slow, dainty rainfall, and Bucky ignored the impending imagery of it all as he guided his dates indoors, all gentleman-like.

His victory over Steve made him indulgent, made him loopy and twisted, and made him enjoy it. He hadn’t the time to judge the characters of the those he dipped and touched and pressed his fingers tryingly into. Hell, he’d struggle to recall their names in a few days’ time when he was strapping a broken helmet on his head and pretending to be anywhere else. But they threw back drinks like he did, laughed in between his jokes that grew worse and grimmer by the hour, ignored the hue of damnation growing steadily in his eyes, in the back of his mind.

They danced no matter how erratic he became. They moved together, in turns, as a unit, like no one watched, and Bucky would come to reflect on this moment months later and realize that the very same men he shared wartime hell with had also been dancing in that same bar on that same night, and they’d all swayed and dipped and jived like it was a death dance to Dionysus.

But he didn’t see that then, not in 1942, not in the drizzle, not while swimming through the languid serenity of knowing Steve would be staying safe. Sarah Rogers could rest easy up in Heaven, a place Bucky still had confidence in.

Bucky found himself drunk, sweaty, warm, and pressed against the cold, wet bricks that made up the outside wall of the bar. With nothing to grip nor hold onto, he fastened his fingers round the blonde’s shoulders, which were suddenly more capable than even his own. Her breath was hot and quick, eager and interested in his physique. Bucky melted and stiffened all at once at the implication. Not one for tenderness, not having the stomach for it anymore, she was something to engulf.

Thunder erupted overhead, threatened to spill a gallon or eighty of rainwater over their heads, and Bucky relished the drag of seashell pink lipstick over his cheeks, the square of his jaw, the pores and hair follicles of his neck.

This was familiar and foreign, loved and feared, all at once. Heat flushed Bucky’s figure, blossomed from his middle to his limbs in slow, obstinate waves. He took what he could get, and took, and took, and took because there would be little left to revel in soon.

A crack of lightning exploded overhead, all bright and savage-like, and his partner shrieked. Bucky’s arms went rigid, his whole form along with it, and watched as the fright came and left from her eyes.

“Dammit…can’t it hold off a little while longer?”

Her hands trailed down his uniform, hung about his buttons for a moment. Bucky’s mind was wandering, dodging puddles.

“Why, were you enjoying yourself?”

She grinned. “Enough, I suppose.”

Her lips scrunched together as a raindrop planted itself on the tip of her nose. Bucky watched the resulting drips ricochet off her skin, found humor in her bemused expression.

“You’re the one who couldn’t wait to get outta there, ya know,” Bucky reminded her as her stare became dull daggers, nothing to bleed over.

“Shaddup. I’m just doing my duty, after all. Well-wishing you sorry souls goodbye.”

Remembering his manners (Mrs. Barnes cried out up in Heaven, too, begging as much from her pathologically loutish son), Bucky scooted over and made room for her under the foot or so of roof hanging above their heads, near the flooded gutter. The tips of their shoes became doused in the precipitation, and Bucky watched as his booted toes went from tan to brown to black.

“Speaking of which…” she went on, digging into her pockets, removing a pack of cigarettes immaculately preserved from the rain. “You got a light?”

He was offended by the question, lit her cigarette.

She continued, “ _Speaking of which_ : that friend of yours. How’s he going to fare? When you’re gone?”

Bucky feigned confusion. He wore it as a mask to hide his embarrassment at being found out. (At least, he felt like he’d been.) He hated being transparent, especially around pretty blonde hair.

“How do you mean?”

She exhaled and flicked the tobacco dregs to the floor. They disappeared in moisture immediately. “You two seem close, and he’s no fighter. You could snap his wrists right in _half_. Are you worried about him?”

Bucky, on the defensive, became incredibly, mechanically, boyish and cheeky. His eyebrows raised, his shoulders shrugged, his lips pulled slyly, searching for the most efficient way of humorously throwing Steve under the bus that would convey everything he _wasn’t_ thinking.

“Ah, when _aren’t_ I worried about that kid.” He cleared his throat. “He’s a right asshole with a penchant for gettin’ himself killed. I’ll be glad to _not_ be followin’ his tail everywhere he goes.”

That wasn’t the right answer, judging by the way her eyes folded and narrowed and how her gaze darkened. She’d assumed control over the exchange yet again. Hell, hadn’t he been the one to lead when they were dancing?

“You two live together?”

“Yeah, have for a bit. His family can’t…can’t afford a big enough place right now. I’m just givin’ him a roof to sleep under till he finds a suitable job.”

She flicked her cigarette again. “He help around the house?”

“Yeah, sure,” he replied.

“He know how to cook?”

Bucky jeered. “Hardly.”

“He pay rent?”

These fucking blondes.

“Y-yeah. He does. Yeah.”

“Hm. How much?”

“Lady, I did _not_ follow you out here, in the freezing cold rain, to be in _terr_ ogated. You know that?”

She laughed and waved a hand, dismissing the inquiry. Bucky caught a waft of the smoke up his nose and imagined how quickly it would roast the inside of Steve’s lungs before worrying that she could see his own thoughts through his eyes.

“But it’s so _fun_!” she wailed theatrically, giggling with a spasm of the fanatic, the melodrama, unique to these sorts of girls – the ones Bucky couldn’t get enough off, he’d learn – and straightened the collar of his jacket with ease, her fit gone.

“Grant me but _one_ more question, Sergeant?”

“Shoot, my lady.”

“What’s _my_ name?”

Bucky looked blankly ahead (Mrs. Barnes wailed in failure, sending another boom of thunder shaking through the soles of his shoes) and swallowed.

“Sara,” she informed him, sucking her teeth, grin dropping down into a smirk full of estranged pity, almost like he’d confirmed a suspicion she’d been harboring. “It’s Sara Redfield.”

And Bucky pretended he wasn’t affected by that name, pretended instead to feel bad for mucking things up.

“I’m sorry,” he sighed, scratching the back of his head and looking elsewhere, at his shoes, at her shoes, at the storm clouds. “You just got me all liquor-ed up, ya see…”

“Nah, don’t sweat it,” she assured him. The allure and erotics were gone from her tone. Very abruptly, too. Bucky looked bereft, robbed, even. “It’s best not to get attached to you folks, especially not tonight.”

“You think I’m someone worth gettin’ attached to?”

Sara Redfield shoved forth the hand that lingered on his collar, sending him a beat backwards. They both snickered. Bucky loathed the way he sounded guttural, sounded drunk.

“Don’t get me twisted, _James Buchanan Barnes_. I’m not easy.”

“I wasn’t implying that you _were_.”

“Besides, your head’s elsewhere.”

Another bolt lit up Brooklyn. The wind was picking up, blowing like hell down the alleyways, Bucky and Sara caught in between. She rushed to flatten her skirt and the vote of modesty felt out of place.

“I’m not _that_ drunk, miss Redfield,” he clarified, adjusting his hat amidst his flamboyant curls that threatened to spill down onto his forehead. As if to spite him, Sara laced a finger around one.

“You’re not with me right now. No. I can see it. In your eyes. You’re leaving behind a lot tomorrow.”

Mania gone. Somber now. Sara Redfield stared to the metal gutter in suspended, apathetic grief, such that already Bucky presumed himself dead.

“It wouldn’t be fair of me to distract you,” she finished.

She was a mind-reader, no question about it, and thus Bucky deemed it hopeless to lie. He was also just tired of doing it.

“Wouldn’t be fair of me to get a wonderful lady like yourself wrapped up in all that, neither.”

Her gaze softened. “How sweet of you.”

There was a lull in conversation, a pause, a painful one, one which Sara used to take stock of their surroundings and make the executive decision to dismantle the rest of Bucky’s psyche before taking her leave.

“You oughta go home, hm? You’re worried about your friend. You two hardly said goodbye. I watched you. You were too busy with running back to Mary and me, left him _standing_ there.”

“You been spyin’ on me all night or something?” he replied.

“Sort of. I might find you agreeable to spy upon, you know, especially after this friend of yours proved to be such a miserable date.”

Bucky grimaced. “He’s sorry about that.”

“How do you know?”

“Take my word for it.”

Sara shook her head. “You better run home and ask him about it, just to be safe. So you don’t die of a guilty conscience.”

That wouldn’t do. Bucky was prepared to sleep under a bridge if need be, just to avoid confronting Steve. Maybe he’d get lucky and bite the bullet via hypothermia and fear before he had to ship out tomorrow morning. But Sara was right, and Bucky couldn’t have hated anyone more for it.

“And leave you out here to freeze?” Bucky scoffed. “Now how can I go off to war knowing that I left you – “

“Jesus H. _Christ_. Sara? You back here?”

Both Bucky and Sara Redfield turned their heads around the corner of the bar, down the alley, and saw brown-haired Mary with gangly, army-suited man in tow tearing down the muddy backstreet in search of her companion.

“Where the devil have you been, huh? I thought that _sergeant_ _Brown_ or whatever had kidnapped you or something!” Mary shouted, squinting through the storm. Her skirt flew right up in everyone’s faces and she simply let it happen.

“Sergeant _Barnes_ here is harmless, Mary Jane,” Sara assured her, weaving herself delicately around Bucky, tracing her painted fingers from his shoulder blade to his arm as she went. The touch left chills behind, chills that climbed and nestled within Bucky’s neck.

“He was so afraid of leaving me here alone that he vouched to wait till you got ‘round to finding me. Right, sergeant?”

Bucky swallowed, ice cold. “That’s right, miss Redfield.”

Eyelashes fluttering shut, blonde Sara pressed her pink lips to the frigid cheek of Bucky Barnes, and whispered against his skin,

“Come home to Brooklyn, won’t you? You got folks that need you around here.”

He lied and said he would, knowing full well that Sara could see through the fib. In a huff, Mary snatched Sara’s gloved wrist and carried her back to civilization, whatever date she’d scrounged taking up the rear. Bucky had half a mind to memorize his appearance, the frown plastered permanently on his face, so he’d recognize him again in Hell. But instead he scampered away along with the rest of them, and Bucky’s heart was a stampede in his chest.

It beat double-time. Every three heartthrobs constituted a single footstep. Bucky darted back to their dreary apartment against the wind that pulled and tugged and yanked him in the opposite direction. It sent his jacket flapping, blew open his buttons, shook the collar the wondrous Sara Redfield had taken such care to flatten and uncurl after being the one to ruffle it up in the first place.

She’d been beautiful, thought he was _something_ , and of the good kind, for sure, yet he was running back to Steve. Predictable as all hell. Bucky was slipping on mud, scratching dirty rain from his eyes, wiping it down his cheeks, being beaten from side to side by rageful breezes, and running back to Steve because Bucky didn’t want to leave tomorrow morning, because he didn’t know what to do without Steve guiding him.

_But the sunflower crop was massive, tall, and suffocating_

The candle, in the left window near the stairs, was still lit. The tongue was small. Bucky’s stomach flipped in torment, knowing that he’d be seeing Steve and that Steve would see him like this, cheeks pink and icy, tears welling up behind his eyelids like long-dried out dams rudely, unexpectedly flooded with water. But that pull toward the dim yellow light, toward the stairs, toward the scratchy sofa, toward the flaxen locks, toward his guide, was resilient.

He shut the apartment door as quietly as possible, knowing the hinge would squeak anyway, and stripped off his boots only to find that his wool socks squelched messily as he tiptoed forth, completely waterlogged. They left damp footprints in his wake.

Steve, however, had left his own trail. From the candlelit corner to the sofa was a scattering of torn notebook pages and eraser shavings. Bucky, wiping his nose and eyes on his forearm, followed the drawings from their origin to their climax with blurred, weepy vision.

They were figure sketches, extravagant despite their liminal medium of pencil on paper. They grew and grew in detail and expertise until Bucky landed on what he assumed to be the final product laid on the floor just beneath Steve’s dangling hand. Having passed out on the couch, Bucky slowly retrieved the last drawing from under the artist’s unconscious fingers.

It was Bucky Barnes in full American military attire, looked rugged and ragged and sickeningly handsome – it was a saccharine, self-indulgent illustration on Steve’s part – and waving his free hand at whomever was watching. The other gripped a shotgun. He wore a knife around his right thigh. Dirt and blood dotted his cheeks in a fetching way, not violent, just American and utilitarian and democratic and good. His hair was ruffled and curled, glinting in the manufactured light of the drawing.

This picturesque Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes belonged on those posters Steve fawned over. It didn’t match the version Steve knew in person. And Bucky stared longingly, tragically, at this alternate reality until its creator drifted back awake.

“Didn’t think you’d make it back…” Steve murmured through a yawn, stretching two arms over his head. “Thought Mary or Sara woulda…woulda made you…”

He didn’t finish, mouth preoccupied by a yawn. Bucky quickly put down the drawing, inexplicably embarrassed at having been caught with it.

“Drank too much,” Bucky whispered.

“Yeah, I can smell it on ya.”

Grinning sheepishly, Bucky felt like crying, felt like bursting into tears like a child and clinging to a breast. Any breast would do.

“Well, I’m here now. Go back to sleep, Stevie.”

Instead, Steve resolved to look dead ahead into Bucky’s eyes, gaze relaxing upon impact. Bucky had no clue what Steve uncovered in his countenance, but he was obviously unhappy with it, and shifted to lay on his stomach.

“What time do you leave tomorrow?”

“I’ll be outta here before sun-up.”

It didn’t earn a response, at least not one spoken aloud. Steve nodded his head slightly at Bucky’s mattress but a few paces away and, in silence, Bucky followed the age-old, ritualistic instructions. He gripped the yellowed corners with two hands, dragged the mattress next to Steve’s sofa, pillows and all, and stripped slowly, down to his briefs and undershirt.

“You shouldn’t sleep in that shirt. You’re soaked.”

The comment went over his head; surely Steve hadn’t expected him to take heed of it. Bucky let his knees collapse. His chest, arms, and neck followed suit. Soon he was a ball underneath a thinning cotton sheet with Steve’s hand swaying precariously just in front of his squarish nose.

“You be fuckin’ safe, alright Rogers?” Bucky muttered, practically thinking out loud. He sent another hand down his face, wiping away the rain, Sara Redfield’s lipstick, his tears, the night, the future.

“You’ll write?” Steve countered, a harsher blow.

“Don’t come after me. I _mean_ it.”

“ _I’ll_ write. I’ll send you drawings.”

“I’ll get you more pencils. And paints. Fuck it, an _easel_. I hear they make ‘em good there, in Italy.”

“Don’t forget about me.”

“I’ll be back. Don’t follow me.”

Bucky treated Steve’s hand, knobby fingers and slim wrists and chilly palms, like a breast upon which he wept. Silently, without tears, just the feeling of his throat being sliced and strained and carved raw. Steve caressed Bucky’s cheek without acknowledging it, without speaking further.


End file.
